BELUGA – From Situational Awareness to a coordinated data workflow

Those who operate autonomous vehicles under or above water want to know where they are, if they are doing well and if they are doing what they supposed to do. Sometimes it makes sense to interfere in the mission or to request a status of a vehicle. When the GEOMAR AUV team were asked to bring two Hover AUVs (part of the MOSES Helmholtz Research Infrastructure Program; “Modular Observation Solutions for Earth Systems”) into operational service, that was exactly what we wanted. We decided to create our own tool: BELUGA.
After almost 3 years BELUGA is a core tool for our operational work with our GIRONA 500 AUVs and their acoustic seafloor beacons. BELUGA allows communication and data exchange between those devices mentioned above and the ship.
Every component inside this kind of ad hoc network has an extended driver installed. This driver handles the messages and their content and decides which communication channels to use: Wi-Fi, satellite or acoustical communication. The driver of the shipborne component has additionally a module for a data model, which allows to add more network devices, sensors and messages in future. The user works on a web based graphical interface, which visualizes all the information coming from the devices. The operator also can interact with the device, start and stop processes or mission, if the integrated BELUGA driver has access to the system of the device or vehicle.
But why this is a topic in a Data Science Symposium? Autonomous devices, either mobile or immobile, carry sensors which gather scientific data. A communication platform like BELUGA could support quality control by receiving and verifying sections or fragments of the data sets from the device according the bandwidth. Vehicles could look for anomalies and allows selective sampling, making data gathering more effective. The user interface could lead the user/operator through the entire, automated and clear coordinated data process until it is handed over to the responsible data management. The above-mentioned check of sent fragments during the mission would be part of this workflow but also an automated data export.
Last year we started a project with our Data Management Department to work on a software tool which download and brings the data sets of each dive of our AUVs into an agreed format. In this way the scientist on board of a research cruise gets the data in a form which is already prepared for a final hand over. It is clearly described where to find raw or already processed data, which metadata are inside and a description of the vehicle mission, the vehicle used and the sensors on it. The export tool is not a part of BELUGA but the user interface allows the triggering and monitoring of the so automated data workflow. We hope this will improve the data handling and ease the work of the team on board. It is still an ongoing project but the first version is going to be used on a research cruise next June.
And there are more aspects in term of data visualization on ongoing campaigns. During former projects an Online-Portal for Monitoring Surface vehicles was created. Those experiences were incorporated into BELUGA. One possible application here is public outreach. The BELUGA user interface is in this case a compact source of information for the interested public. The adventurer Arved Fuchs, for example, uses BELUGA in this way for his OCEAN CHANGE campaign. It shows the track of his ship Dagmar Aaen, visualizes the data of the environmental sensors and it is also used to narrate his travel by linked blocks and social media posts.
BELUGA is our tool to communicate and exchange data and we are looking for more partners to figure out what more is possible.